Re: Seezzitonian

Yahya Abdal-Aziz <yahya@...> ttabtasisa:
> Dennis Paul Himes wrote:
>>    The Seezzitonian alphabet is now up on the web.  See
>>http://home.cshore.com/himes/umuto/phono.htm and
>>http://home.cshore.com/himes/umuto/lang.htm.
>
> You described S. as "highly inflected" - after reading
> your outline of the grammar, I suspect you of rather
> understating the case!
>
> What's your motivation for so much inflection,
    Partly just because I thought it would be cool, but also as a contrast
to Gladiltian.  Gladilatian has a strict syntax, and the grammatical
relationships between words is determined by their order.  Seezzitonian is
somewhat the opposite of this.

> and did you have a natural language analogue for this
> vast array of cases?
    Finnish is known to have a large number of cases, but I don't know it at
all, so it wasn't really an inspiration.
    The natural language which I do know some and which has similarities to
Seezzitonian, both linguistic and cultural, is Latin.  The similarities
include:
- highly inflected
- alphabetic writing system
- language of an empire extensive in time and space
- ancestor of languages spoken in that space in later times
- language of scholarship long after it ceased to be anyone's L1
Differences from Latin, however, include:
- defaults to SVO
- no separate part of speech for adjectives
- more types of agreement (e.g. D.O. with verb tense and mood)
- less difference between literary and vulgar forms
- no real equivalent to Greek, either as source of borrowing or language of
  empire

 ===========================================================================

                 Dennis Paul Himes    <>    himes@cshore.com
                   http://home.cshore.com/himes/dennis.htm
       Seezzitonian page: http://home.cshore.com/himes/umuto/lang.htm

Disclaimer: "True, I talk of dreams; which are the children of an idle
brain, begot of nothing but vain fantasy; which is as thin of substance as
the air."                      - Romeo & Juliet, Act I Scene iv Verse 96-99

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